Moment by moment

[desperance]

Self-praise is of course no recommendation, and I am trying to avoid it; this really isn't see how good I am, it's see, this is why I love my job.

It's because I get to write the moments. Not the great sweeping epic battles, or the insidious political manoeuvrings, or the surging romances. Those are good too, it's all good except when it's awful (which of course is frequently concurrent with the goodness); but it's the individual moments that I love. Like this:

There was music somewhere in the wood, drifting through the trees: low and plaintive, haunting almost, a breathy melody that seemed as right as moonlight, as natural as windsong. And utterly impersonal, heedless, unattached: the very opposite of what so threatened her. Close, perhaps, but remote. Like someone standing by her, and looking at the stars.

That moment for the writer, where you catch the moment's character in the last short sentence. Like this again, half a page later:

One more breath, and she could smell - oh lord, the whole country of England, all the damp dank buried wonder of it, what she went to the city to forget. To escape, along with everyone else.

It's what I love as a reader too, those moments of sudden recognition that trip you up, that make you laugh aloud though there's nothing remotely funny about them, it's just that they demand acknowledgement, a kind of punctuation in the world. To mark the moment.

Comments

[badbookworm]

I love "the damp dank buried wonder of it" - though I ache to put commas in there. I can see why you haven't, and it's better for it, but nevertheless, my red pen twitches.

[desperance]

Yeah. I am on the whole anti-comma, except when demanded for sense (rather than rule). Mostly the words do the job on their own, I find. (But I do at least know the rules I'm breaking. I think that's important.)

[badbookworm]

I'm a desperate comma fiend. When I'm editing I put them in, the Line Editors take them out, I stet, and so we dance along. But if you're clever enough with words, I agree they're not needed. "...damp dank buried wonder" is clever enough that it doesn't need any direction. And "...damp, dank, buried wonder" would not be as pleasing.

I am, on the whole, a prononent of punctuation as a way to clarify one's meaning, regardless of whether that follows the "rules" or not. But then I'm also a victim of the run-on sentence in my own writing, so...